Where were you? We were hoping to see you here at Gear Expo. We were surprised that you didn't make it. Anyway, we had a really good show, along with more than a hundred other leading companies in the gear industry who exhibited this year.

Welcome to our Product News page. Here we feature new products of interest to the gear and gear products markets.

Listen carefully these days and you'll hear a faint rumbling among the economic masses. It's probably nothing to worry about. It'll most likely go away. It's only the naysayers and skeptics who predict that the end is near. They've been doing to far almost all eight years of our current economic boom, and they've been wrong so far.

Happy days are here again, says the old song, and given the current economic numbers, one can scarcely argue. Productivity is up; unemployment is down; inflation is practically nonexistent; the budget deficit is shrinking fast.

Economic times are good right now in America and in the gear industry. We're in the seventh year of an up cycle. The tough shake-outs of the 1980s and early 90s are over. Orders are up. Backlogs are at comfortable levels. We're looking at what promises to be the biggest, most successful trade show in the industry's history coming up in Detroit in October. The most pressing question on the immediate horizon seems to be "How long can the good times go on?"

Just back from IMTS and once again, I'm struck by the enormous vitality and strength of the manufacturing sector of the U.S. economy. It has made a phoenix-like rise from the grave dug for it by pundits in the '80s and has come back more robust and competitive than ever.

A good many things bother me about election years - the annoying sound bites, the negative commercials, the endless political over-analysis. But what bothers me most about the coming election is this: So far (when I'm writing this, it's admittedly early in the campaign) there's little or no talk about what is one of the most critical national issues of the next thirty years - our growing government debt.

On of the key questions confronting any company considering ISO 9000 certification is, how much is this going to cost? The up-front fees are only the beginning. Dissect the ISO 9000 certification procedure with an eye for hidden costs, and two segments of the process will leap out - the cost of consultants and the cost of making in-house improvements for the sake of passing certification. Most of these costs can be controlled by careful selection f the right consultant in the first place.

Complete calendar for May/June 1994.

Another year has passed and, because of the short term ups and downs of the economy, it's still hard to judge whether we are in an appreciably different place than we were a year ago. The economy doesn't seem to be worse than it was, but it also doesn't seem to be a whole lot better.